Hot or Not? Marketing Trends for 2025 Stress Tested – Trend #3: Social media as a search engine

Are the marketing trends that everyone is talking about all they’re cracked up to be?  We’ve stress tested them to see if you should be following them, or doing things a different way in 2025.  In this series we look at the top five marketing trends – read on for Trend #3 and then visit our Food For Thought page for the rest of the series.

Trend 3: Social media as a search engine

Consumers are increasingly using social media channels as a way to search for products and services, particularly Gen Z which prefers the likes of Instagram and TikTok to traditional search engines like Google. Social media ecommerce—which accounted for 19.4% of all internet purchases in 2024—will continue to expand, with shoppable posts and influencers driving sales.

Stress-test result: Avoid the ‘bandwagon effect’, know your customers first

It’s true that consumers are shifting towards social media channels as a way to find the products they love, but as a business you need to avoid falling victim to the ‘bandwagon effect’—that is, basing your marketing strategy on doing things that all of the other brands are doing.

The mistake businesses make is thinking about search as a linear, isolated channel.

We should be thinking of search as a category of user behaviour. How do we make sure we’re present where users go to get answers to their questions that are related to our proposition? That could be social media, Reddit, closed communities, or even friends and family. To understand where people search, we must get a deeper insight into the customer journey.

“For too long, we’ve thought about search as a linear, isolated channel. We should be thinking of search as a category of user behaviour.” – Bethan Vincent

You need to be customer-focused, not platform-focused, and you need to be listening to the ‘Voice of the Customer’ at all times. After all, if TikTok was to be banned across Europe tomorrow, your business would have to react accordingly—and, ultimately, there will be other platforms that emerge in the next few years that will disrupt the status quo.

The key here is to understand your target audience and their media habits. You need to make sure you’re allocating a budget effectively, with a testing budget in place and primary research to help you understand how your audience is using these channels.

Effective marketing isn’t about being busy, but being focused, and thinking before doing. You need to understand what actually moves the needle, align the marketing strategy with your wider business goals and reach a defined audience with a clear proposition.

Our research report, ‘Marketing Vulnerabilities in Tech and IP-led Companies’, based on independent research conducted earlier this year found that many businesses aren’t taking the time to understand their customers. Indicative of this was the insight that businesses are failing to develop their brand proposition based on the views and feedback of their target market.

When asked ‘Which best describes how you brought your product/proposition to market?’ over one quarter (26.5%) reported having ‘a great idea and launched it as soon as we could’, while almost half (48.7%) responded ‘We had a great idea that we developed further based on our own views and understanding of the market’. Just 17.9% stated that they developed their idea further based on research or target customer input before launch.

In order to successfully capture the attention of your market on social media your messaging needs to elevate you above the competition, and this requires a lot of work to understand what the potential customers want to see from you across different channels.  Kantar’s Media Reactions 2024 report identified a 28% drop in the number of people reporting that social media ads captured their attention compared to 2023 (31% versus 43%).

This isn’t to say that social doesn’t represent a good opportunity for smaller brands that may have found themselves getting pushed out from the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) by AI-generated answers, or impacted by LLM’s that are complicating the search landscape by adding further change to search behaviours.  Social media gives these smaller brands the chance to get in front of their target audience, but you need to try harder than ever before to gain attention.

Key takeaways

1. Search is not a linear, isolated channel, but a category of user behaviour.

2. You need to be customer-focused, not platform-focused.

3. Ensure your proposition is a great idea based on what customers’ actually want—if people want something they’ll be searching for it!

4. Many businesses aren’t taking the time to understand the consumer, but this is essential in order to capture audience attention on social media.